I recently heard Elon Musk talk about a concept he called ‘First Principles’.
Hang on a minute I thought, I’ve heard of that before.
A quick google search led me to Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs!
“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?”.
Who’d have thought you’d ever be able to get Hannibal lector and Elon Musk into the same sentence … but here we are 🙂
(And, if you want to know how Marcus Aurelius figures into this, I’ll let you google that for yourself!)
Here’s how Elon explains First Principles as it relates to his foray into the electric vehicle market …
“Somebody could say (and in fact people do) that battery packs are really expensive, and that’s the way they will always be because that’s the way they have been in the past. That’s pretty dumb, because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing.”
“(…) it’s going to cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. And it’s not going to be much better in the future.”
“What are the batteries made of? First Principles would say “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents?”
“It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, and some polymers for separation, and a steel can. Break that down on a material basis, if we bought that on a London metal exchange, what would each one of those things cost.”
“Oh gee, it’s like $80 per kilowatt-hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”
What caught my attention here was how – in his mind at least – the obstacle had been obliterated from the minute he said ‘so CLEARLY you JUST need to …’
Which I guess is what Hannibal Lector meant when he described First Principles as – SIMPLICITY.
